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Richard Roderick, Program Director for the Justice Scholars Program is featured in the Yale News

Film director John Lucas hoped to show jailed friends’ ‘complex humanity’

By Susan Gonzalez

february 1, 2018

When two men who were once among the four Ohio restaurant robbers who gained notoriety as “The Cooler Bandits” took the stage at Yale on Jan. 30, many in the audience felt they knew them personally.

Before Richard “Poochie” Roderick and Donovan Harris made their entrance in the Whitney Humanities Center, the audience watched the nearly two-hour documentary film “The Cooler Bandits,” which follows their journeys and that of their other two friends — Charlie Kelly and Frankie Porter — through different stages of their incarceration and reintegration into society. The film is directed by John Lucas, who joined Roderick and Harris in a Q&A after the screening.

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